Archive for the ‘Slogans’ Category
September 17, 2023
Reported on Facebook by a friend, who treated it as a display of real Amurrican values, this sign on an aisle in a US supermarket:
Aisle 11: a text culminating in Guns Bibles Sweatpants
As always, I wanted to know what store this came from and when, but the sign came to me as something just being passed around on the web, and nobody involved in such transmissions (of images or text or both together) has any interest in knowing where they come from, so it’s pointless to ask. Since such memic items are very often inventions, or involve doctored photos, I was suspicious of this one: too good to be true?
Some rooting around eventually brought me to the relevant fact-checking Snopes site, but not before I’d fashioned the climax of Aisle 11 into a parody song.
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Posted in Parody, Poetry, Signage, Slogans | Leave a Comment »
July 17, 2022
Another adventure in dubious commercial names and slogans. In the past few days the hyperkinetic tv pitchman Phil Swift — the id of the Flex Seal company, the Billy Mays of liquid rubber — has been assaulting my senses with a slogan that annoys me every time — just the way it was supposed to — because I get the sleazy sense of the commercial’s slogan
Take it from the man on the can
(‘from the guy sitting on the toilet (doing his business)’) instead of the innocent sense ‘from the man whose picture is on the label of the can (of Flex Seal)’. (In passing, I note the mini-festival of metonymy here: the man isn’t on the can, his picture is; well, not on the can itself, but on the label affixed to the can.) Let me start with a photo of an exemplary Flex Seal can:
(#1) You will note the absence, on the label, of a face of any person whatsoever, much less Phil Swift; as far as I can tell, the labels are all like that, and that’s no accident: Swift’s face is entirely beside the point — you’ll see that plenty in the commercials — because the ad’s all about taking your thoughts, memorably, into (or onto) the toilet
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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Language in advertising, Metaphor, Metonymy, Puns, Slang, Slogans | 1 Comment »
July 11, 2022
Appearing in my FB as a response to my 7/4 posting (for Fathers Day) “I am a good Boy for you, Daddy” (about Daddy – Boy relationships), this remarkable billboard (without identification or comment), featuring a pig-cop character — Mister Piggie — getting oral with an inert character Boy :
(#1) Pig Kisses Boy! Pig because he’s a cop? Pig because he’s unable to control his sexual impulses? (or, of course, both); I suppose that’s supposed to be life-saving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but still: ick
The text looks like a book title (or maybe a quotation from a book), attributed to some Bobby Peters we’re expected to recognize. Is the billboard advertising a book by football player and game analyst Bobby Peters? About whom I had trouble getting much information, but then that’s an alien world to me. I spent maybe half an hour fruitlessly trying to chase Bobby Peters down, and then a search on “some call him pig” turned up a Boing Boing posting “Some call him pig!” by Rob Beschizza from 3/3/22. To start with, the football Bobby Peters has nothing to do with it; it’s about a Columbus GA mayor named Bobby Peters. And there’s a 50-year history of “Some call him Pig!”.
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Posted in Address terms, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Memes, Music, Parody, Signage, Slogans, Slurs | Leave a Comment »
November 18, 2021
… that is known as Miller Time … when you deserve a beer break today.
None of this makes sense unless you know the advertising slogans: It’s Miller Time (for Miller High Life beer, not for novelist Henry Miller, playwright Arthur Miller, or bandleader Glenn Miller), You Deserve a Break Today (for McDonald’s, hawking hamburgers, not beer). But Calvin knows:
(#1) The Calvin and Hobbes strip distributed today, originally published 10/9/86, alluding to “Miller Time” slogans in Miller High Life beer commercials from the period
Calvin is supposed to be 6 years old — admittedly, with the sensibilities of a boy of roughly 10, but, still, not expected to be familiar with the ways of beer-drinking, so his father is alarmed that Calvin seems to be looking forward to a brew after the occupations of his day. (Whatever happened to the Children’s Hour? Television happened.)
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Posted in Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Slogans, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
April 11, 2018
Things you can do with a fist.
Yesterday, in my posting “Two cartoons from friends”, significant uncertainty about whether the verb to fist in the second cartoon was intended merely as a contact-action verb (roughly, ‘to punch’) or as a reference to a sexual practice. Right after that, friends posted photos of this t-shirt, on sale (in a range of sizes, from infants’ on up) in Walmart:
(#1) The fisting love t-shirt, available from many sources on amazon.com and elsewhere
Apparently intended as a joke, but possibly understood by some as an innocent reference to fist-bumping.
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Posted in Gesture, Language of sex, Rainbow, Signs and symbols, Slogans, Sociocultural conventions | 1 Comment »
October 26, 2017
On the 23rd, “The pumpkin spice cartoon meme”, with a variety of developments of pumpkin spice ‘spice for pumpkin (pie)’ to concrete uses for the flavor of such spice and the scent of such spice and then to figurative uses ‘special, extraordinary’ and from there ‘top-grade’. Now, some further developments:
The possibility that Pumpkin Spice might be a Spice Girl (Michael Palmer asks on Facebook, “Which of the Spice Girls is Pumpkin Spice?”).
More generally, the rule of thumb: if spice, then pumpkin spice, as in this playful e-card:
(#1) The verb spice up > pumpkin spice up
And, as also illustrated in #1, the metonymical extension of pumpkin spice to ‘autumnal’ (thanks to the association of the spice with the fall).
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Posted in Language and food, Language play, Metonymy, Music, Names, Slogans | 2 Comments »
May 14, 2017
(Plain talk about men’s bodies and sexual practices, so use your judgment.)
Thanks to Greg Parkinson for a link to this John Crisvitello t-shirt:
(#1)
The slogan is a send-up of the odious BROS BEFORE HOS, preserving only the rhyming, the street language, and a message about balancing allegiances. My reading of the slogan is that it calls for gay men to generally value bonds to other gay men — fags stand with fags — over the sorts of allegiances expressed in flags: nationality, regional identity, religion, race and ethnicity, political affiliation, etc.
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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Music, Phallicity, Slogans | Leave a Comment »
